The Past Is Red

by Catherynne M. Valente

This is it. This is the future. Garbagetown and the sea. We can’t go back, not ever, not even for a minute. We are so lucky. Life is so good. We’re going on and being alive and being shitty sometimes and lovely sometimes just the same as we always have, and only a Fuckwit couldn’t see that.

I have a little moringa tree coming along in a 15-gallon paint bucket sandwiched between the pilot’s wheel and the blue vinyl jump seats. It’s twisted and lumpy and crappy. It should grow huge and fabulous, but it got planted in a plastic bucket meant to hold satin finish exterior latex paint in #4L61 Breakfast in Tuscany instead of in Southeast Asia, so it never will. I relate mightily to my moringa tree.

There are some things you just can’t ever get back. Years. Gannet birds. Husbands. Antarctica.

“What do you want to be when you grow up?” “Forgiven,” I whispered, and he kissed my forehead but he didn’t say anything, the way you don’t say anything when a kid says they want to be an astronaut when they grow up. It’s kinder to let them think it’s possible.

Oh, I know they were all the worst kind of death-guzzling monsters, sick and swollen as blood blisters, stupid, hungry, toothful voids in the shape of people, but they must have loved one another so fucking much.

All their mountains of golden wasteful love held up Garbagetown, which seemed like it meant something, something vital, but I was so tired I couldn’t quite get hold of it.

I eat, I perspire, I sleep, I excrete, I regret my choices, I yearn for the past. I have a very full schedule.

Just be trash together and love as long as you can and then stop when you can’t anymore and be trash separately.

And in my dream, if the fathers and mothers loved their sons and daughters and sang to them in their cradles, they made a good country, and if they didn’t, they made a tyranny, so whether existence is a bloodbath or a bubble bath could hinge on whether a little child got kissed good night with a story and a glass of water or sent to bed without snuggles or a snack or a cohesive philosophy of justice.”

I think kings happen because some people have an empty place inside them that wants to be full and it will do anything to feel full and the first thing that makes it feel the opposite of empty it will chase forever and ever. And the weirdest thing about this place is that obeying fills it up, but making someone else obey makes it slosh up and splash all over the floor.” “And you don’t have that place, I assume?” “I don’t have any empty places in me, Red. I’m packed tight with happiness and luck and all the things that have happened to me and my elephant seal and my moringa tree and my boat and all the love I’ve saved up. But sometimes I think I can smell that space when I meet a person. Whether they have or don’t have it. I can smell their craving to not be empty anymore. And it frightens me.”

Man cannot live on Wellbutrin alone.

She listens, and I wish I could give her a little gold trophy for it, but I can’t, because of all the things Fuckwits gave trophies for, they never thought listening like nothing exists but time and words was half as important as losing a volleyball tournament.

I want to be a Fuckwit.” “I don’t,” I said evenly. “They ruined everything.” Babybel sobbed. “I want to ruin everything! That’s my birthright!

This is why you died, you fucking Fuckwits! You had to lock everything up behind a million million pretend walls so no one else could get to it and have any fun and you could all be sneaky hoarding dragons all the time even though it doesn’t matter and no one cares and now there’s crabs in your skulls. Babies share, and you couldn’t do it. I was born in your toilet, I should at least get to use your shit even if I never worked for Sam-sung! You’re still making everything terrible for me, thanks a lot!

One time a Fuckwit brought a snowball into work to prove that the planet getting warmer was just a story to scare little ones and I don’t know for sure but I like to think he (or at least all his descendants) got eaten by sharks.

In the end, the only way to talk to the past was to be a dead girl. I heard a deep need in its voice, the great primal horror, the beginning of attachment: after all these years, after the death of all, this broken machine just wanted its mother.

Then you told me what October meant. Not that it was the tenth month of the Gregorian calendar or that it was derived from the Latin word for eight, which was illogical, but data I could easily access. You told me that that October meant autumn, and the sugar maples turning as red as your skirt, the cold seeping into the last of the summer breezes, the longer blacker nights, and Halloween so near. You told me to permanently attach that data to the word October, knowing that when you were gone and I was ready to ship, I would sometimes hear the word October, and when I did I would always hear more than October. That is what love means on the other side of feel.”

“Have you been running a quality assurance test on me all this time, Tetley?” she teases, laughing. But I keep eating snap peas and I don’t say anything back because when you really think about it, it isn’t funny. When humans meet other humans, that’s all they ever do forever.

Being alive is like being a very bad time traveler. One second per second, and yet somehow you still get where you’re going too late, or too early, and the planet isn’t where it should be because you forgot to calculate for that even though it was extremely important and you left notes by the door to remind yourself, and the butterfly you stepped on when you were eight became a hurricane of everything you ever lost in your forties, and whatever wisdom you tried to pack with you has always gotten lost in transit, arriving, covered in festive stickers, a hundred years after you died.

the kind of hope I have isn’t just greed going by its maiden name. The kind of hope I have doesn’t begin and end with demanding everything go back to the way it was when it can’t, it can’t ever, that’s not how time works, and it’s not how oceans work, either. Nothing you love comes back.

“I barely knew you,” I said. “You know me now.” “Do I? You want to tell me why you’re calling yourself a king?” “Say we’re married first. It’s not so bad to be a queen.” “Certainly not, since you’re not a king and everything’s made up and I don’t care. Why do we have to be married? Can’t we just be trash together forever?”

and if we’re just supposed to live in this happy fuckworld of yours some of us need help. It’s the fucking apocalypse! Everyone is depressed!

Everyone wants to start over. You can’t live a minute without getting regret stuck on you. Except you. You’re happy to live in shit and trash and the ruin of your own choices and I will never understand why.

Sixty-six percent of me hates her. But she is sorry and small and alone and I have been sorry and small and alone and it appears I am now in the business of collecting small and alone things. I know how to take care of them. I know how to make them grow in a bucket. I have enough for them. Even if I don’t have enough for me.

What kind of stories would we tell in the new world created by the climate crisis? I thought at once, Well, we’ll tell exactly the same kinds of stories we do now. Exactly the same kinds of stories we always have, through every apocalypse: the fall of Rome, the Black Death, Gilgamesh’s flood, the Warring States period, all of it, the many times and ways in which the world has ended. We’ll tell stories about being born and falling in love and fighting with our families and hoping for something better and dying, because that’s what humans do, and it won’t even take very long before that drowned world is just the world, the absolutely normal and even beautiful landscape of everyday life that, for the children and grandchildren of the end of civilization, will never have been any different.

I wanted to write about something I so firmly believe: that in a good world or a horrific one, the thing people will give the most for, crave the deepest, is entertainment, to be transported from their existence into another, distracted, elevated by stories and lights.

She is the part of humanity that will love anything, find meaning in anything, build a new civilization out of anything, because it’s a compulsion with us. I don’t have a lot of hope for the powers that be pulling us out of the tailspin they put us into. But I have hope for Tetley. For the other worlds to come, which will not be this one, which may never have the ease of this one again, but which will be, one way or another. And be loved by someone.

The oceans can erase our cities, but they cannot drown our existential malaise. That shit’s waterproof.